Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (28 page)

       He rolled in his blanket and when he closed his eyes, he saw Molly again, smiling gently at him, playing checkers, digging mud for him to model. And suddenly the tears came.

       He never had explored the cave past the second room, but in the days that followed, he began a systematic exploration. There were several small openings off the room, and one by one he investigated them, until he was brought up by a sealed passage, or a dropoff, or a ceiling so high he couldn't get to any of the holes there might be up there. He used torches, and his steps were sometimes reckless, but he didn't care if he fell or not, if he got trapped or not. He lost track of how many days he had been in the cave; when he was hungry he ate, when he was thirsty he went to the entrance, scooped up snow, and took it back with him to melt. When he was sleepy he slept.

       On one of his last exploratory trips he heard water running, and he stopped abruptly. He had traveled far, he knew. Over a mile. Maybe two miles. He tried to remember how long his torch had been when he started. Almost full length, and now it was less than a third of that. Another torch hung on his belt, just in case he needed it, but he never had gone so far that he had needed a second torch to get back.

       He had lighted the second torch before he came upon the cave river. Now he felt a new excitement as he realized this had to be the same water that ran through the laboratory cave. It was one system, then, and even if no opening existed other than the one cut by the river, the two sections were linked.

       He followed the river until it vanished into a hole in the cave wall; he would have to swim to go any further. He squatted and stared at the hole. The river appeared in the laboratory cave from just such a hole.

       Another time he would come back with his rope and more torches. He turned to go back to his large room with the fire and food, and now he paid attention to his torch so he could estimate how far he traveled, how far that wall was from his familiar section of the cave. But he knew where he was. He knew on the other side of that wall there was the laboratory, and beyond it the hospital and the dormitories.

       He slept one more time in the cavern, and the next day he left it to return to the community. He had eaten very little for the past few days; he felt half starved and was very tired.

       The snow was inches deeper than it had been, and it was snowing when he arrived in the valley once more. It was nearly dark by the time he got to the hospital building and entered. He saw several people but spoke to no one and went straight to his room, where he pulled off his outer clothes and fell into bed. He was nearly asleep when Barry appeared in the doorway.

       "Are you all right?" Barry asked.

       Mark nodded silently. Barry hesitated a moment, then entered. He stood over the bed. Mark looked up at him without speaking, and Barry reached down and touched his cheek, then his hair.

       "You're cold," he said. "Are you hungry?"

       Mark nodded.

       "I'll bring you something," Barry said. But before he opened the door he turned once more. "I'm sorry," he said. "Mark, I'm truly sorry." He left quickly.

       After he was gone Mark realized they had thought he was dead, and the look he had seen on Barry's face was the same look he could remember seeing on Molly's face a long time ago.

       He didn't care, he thought. They couldn't do anything now to make up for what they had done to him. They hated him and thought he was weak, thought they could control him the way they controlled the clones. And they were wrong. It wasn't enough for Barry to say he was sorry; they would all be sorry before he was done.

       When he heard Barry returning with food, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, not willing to see again that soft, vulnerable look.

       Barry left the tray, and when he was gone, Mark ate ravenously. He pulled the cover over him and before he fell asleep he thought again of Molly. She had known he'd come to feel like this and she had said to wait, wait until he was a man, to learn everything he could first. Her face and Barry's face seemed to blend together, and he fell asleep.

       Andrew had called the meeting, was in charge from start to finish. No one disputed his authority now to take control of the council meetings. Barry watched him from a side chair and tried to feel some of the excitement the younger brother showed.

       "Those of you who want to look over the charts and records, please do so. I have given you the barest summary, not our methods. We can reproduce indefinitely through cloning. We have finally solved the problem that has plagued us from the beginning, the problem of the fifth-generation decline. The fifth, sixth, tenth, one-hundredth, they'll all be perfect now."

       "But only those clones from our youngest people survive," Miriam said drily.

       "We'll work that out too," Andrew said impatiently. "In manipulating the enzymes there are some organisms that react with what appears to be almost an allergic collapse. We'll find out why and take care of it."

       Miriam was looking very old, Barry realized suddenly. He hadn't noticed it before, but her hair was white and her face was thin, with fine lines around her eyes, and she looked tired unto death.

       She looked at Andrew with a disarming smile. "I expect you to be able to solve the problem you have created, Andrew," she said, "but will the younger doctors be able to?"

       "We shall continue to use the breeders," Andrew said with a touch of impatience. "We'll use them to clone those children who are particularly intelligent. We'll go to implantations of clones using the breeders as hosts to ensure a continuing population of capable adults to carry on affairs . . ."

       Barry found his attention wandering. The doctors had gone over it all before the council meeting; nothing new would come out here. Two castes, he thought. The leaders, and the workers, who were always expendable. Was that what they had foreseen in the beginning? He knew it was not possible to find any answers to his question. The clones wrote the books, and each generation had felt free to change the books to conform to their own beliefs. He had made a few such changes himself, in fact. And now Andrew would change them again. And this would be the final change; none of the new people would ever think of altering anything.

       ". . . even more costly in terms of manpower than we expected," Andrew was saying. "The glaciers are moving into Philadelphia at an accelerating rate. We may have only two or three more years to bring out what is salvageable, and it is costing us dearly. We will need hundreds of foragers to go south and east to the coastal cities. We now have some excellent models—the Edward brothers proved especially adept at foraging, as did your own little sisters, the Ella sisters. We'll use them."

       "My little Ella sisters couldn't transcribe a landscape to a map if you strung them by the heels and threatened to slice them inch by inch until they did," Miriam said sharply. "That's exactly what I'm talking about. They can do only those things they have been taught, exactly as they've been taught."

       "They can't draw maps, but they can return to where they've been," Andrew said, no longer trying to conceal his displeasure at the turn the meeting had taken. "That's all we require of them. The implanted clones will do the thinking for them."

       "Then it's true," Miriam said. "If you change the formula, you can produce only those clones you are talking about."

       "Right. We can't handle two different chemical processes, two formulae, two kinds of clones. We've decided this is the best way to proceed at this time, and meanwhile we'll be working on the process, I can assure you. We shall wait until the tanks are empty, in seven months, then make the changes. And we are working out a timetable to plan for the best time to clone the council members and those others who are needed in leadership capacities. We are not rushing into a new procedure without considering every aspect, I promise you, Miriam. At each step we will inform this group of our progress . . ."

       In a tightly thatched lean-to near the mill Mark rested on his elbow and looked at the girl at his side. She was his age, nineteen. "You're cold," he said.

       She nodded. "We won't be able to do this much longer."

       "You could meet me in the old farmhouse," he said.

       "You know I can't."

       "What happens if you try to cross the line? A dragon comes out and breathes fire on you?"

       She laughed

       "Really, what happens? Have you ever tried?"

       Now she sat up and hugged her arms about her bare body. "I'm really cold. I should get dressed."

       Mark held her tunic out of reach. "First tell me what happens."

       She snatched, missed, and fell across him, and for a moment they lay close together. He pulled a cover over her and stroked her back. "What happens?"

       She sighed and drew away from him. "I tried it once," she said. "I wanted to go home, to my sisters. I cried and cried, and that didn't help. I could see the lights, and knew they were just a few hundred feet away. I ran at first, then I began to feel strange, faint, I guess. I had to stop. I was determined to get to the dorm. I walked then, not very fast, ready to grab something if I started to faint. When I got closer to the off-limits line—it's a hedge, you know, just a rose hedge, open at both ends so it's no trouble at all to go around. When I got close to it, the feeling came over me again and everything began to spin. I waited a long time and it didn't stop, but I thought, if I kept my eyes on my feet and didn't pay any attention to anything else, I could walk anyway. I began to walk again." She was lying rigidly beside him now, and her voice was almost inaudible when she went on. "And I started to vomit. I kept vomiting, until I didn't have anything left in me, and then I threw up blood. And I suppose I really did faint. I woke up back in the breeders' room."

       Gently Mark touched her cheek and drew her close to him. She was trembling violently. "Shh, shh," Mark soothed her. "It's all right. You're all right now."

       No walls held them in, he thought, stroking her hair. No fence restrained them, yet they could not approach the river; they could not get nearer the mill than she was now; they could not pass the rose hedge, or go into the woods. But Molly did it, he thought grimly. And they would too.

       "I have to go back," she said presently. The haunted look had come over her face. The emptiness, she had called it. "You wouldn't know what it means," she said, trying to explain. "We aren't separate, you see. My sisters and I were like one thing, one creature, and now I'm a fragment of that creature. Sometimes I can forget it for a short time, when I'm with you I can forget for a while, but it always comes back, and the emptiness comes again. If you turned me inside out, there wouldn't be anything at all there."

       "Brenda, I have to talk to you first," Mark said. "You've been here four years, haven't you? And you've had two pregnancies. It's almost time again, isn't it?"

       She nodded and pulled on her tunic.

       "Listen, Brenda. This time it won't be like before. They plan to use the breeders to clone themselves through implantations of cloned cells. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

       She shook her head, but she was listening, watching.

       "All right. They've changed something in the chemicals they use for the clones in the tanks. Now they can keep on cloning the same person over and over, but he's a neuter. The new clones can't think for themselves; they can't conceive, can't impregnate, they'll never have children of their own. And the council members are afraid they'll lose the scientific skills, the craftsmanship, Miriam's skill at drawing, her eidetic visual memory—all that might be lost if they don't ensure it in the next generation through cloning. Since they can't use the tanks, they'll use the fertile women as hosts. They'll implant you with clones, triplets. And in nine months you'll have three new Andrews, or three new Miriams, or Lawrences, or whatever. They'll use the strongest, healthiest young women for this. And they'll continue to use artificial insemination for the others. When they produce another new talent they can use, they'll clone him several times, implant the clones in your bodies and produce more of him."

       She was staring at him now, openly puzzled by his intensity. "What difference does it make?" she asked. "If that's how we can best serve the community, that's what we have to do."

       "The new babies from the tanks won't even have names," Mark said. "They'll be the Bennies, or the Bonnies, or the Annes, all of them, and their clones will be called that, and theirs."

       She laced her sandal without speaking.

       "And you, how many sets of triplets do you think your body can produce? Three? Four?"

       She was no longer listening.

       Mark climbed the hill over the valley and sat on a limestone rock, looking at the people below, at the sprawling farm that had grown year by year until it filled the whole valley all the way to the bend in the river. Only the old house was an oasis of trees in the autumn fields, which looked like a desert now. Livestock were moving slowly toward the large barns. A group of small boys swept into view, playing something that involved a lot of running, falling down, and running again. Twenty or more of them played together. He was too far away to hear them, but he knew they were laughing.

       "What's wrong with it?" he said aloud, and was surprised by the sound of his voice. The wind stirred the trees, but there were no words, no answer.

       They were content, happy even, and he, the outsider, in his discontent would destroy that to satisfy what had to be selfish desires. In his loneliness he would disrupt an entire community that was thriving and satisfied.